Hi, As promised, another regular(ish) update on the state of the Squeeze release and our plans for the remainder of the cycle.

First of all, some news that some of you may already have guessed.We’re delighted to be able to announce that Mehdi Dogguy has agreed to join the Release Team. He has recently been working on some tools to make it easier for us to manage transitions and we believe that he will be a great addition to the team.

We are still looking for enthusiastic DDs who would be interested injoining the team and helping us to make Squeeze the great release we allbelieve it can be. If you’re interested, please contact us atdebian-release@lists.debian.org or on #debian-release.

Current status==============

Since the previous update, changes to allow init scripts to run inparallel at startup, thus making the boot process faster for manypeople, have been enabled in unstable[PB] and we have finished thedirectfb, evince, netcdf, totem, unixodbc and vtk transitions.

We have just completed the ptlib / opal and evolution / gtkhtmltransitions. The latter means that Squeeze will release with GNOME 2.30along with the already transitioned KDE 4.4.3.

eglibc 2.11 was recently uploaded to unstable. After resolving a fewinitial issues we were able to migrate it to testing over the weekend.

Where next?===========

Now that eglibc 2.11 is in testing, we will shortly be moving to usingPython 2.6 as the default Python version for Squeeze. [PY26]

Other than the Python transition, there are a few other things we aim tocomplete before freezing, including updates to icu, xapian and apt and amove to Perl 5.12, assuming that the outstanding compatibility issuesare resolved or lowered in number. [PERL]

There are also a few smaller updates which we hope to able to schedulealongside the larger transitions.

Transition freeze=================

As announced in the previous release update, we are now instituting afreeze on new transitions in order to make it easier to finishtransitions without them becoming blocked by other changes in unstable.

It may be possible to include smaller updates if time allows and they donot interfere with ongoing transitions. If your upload would requirechanges to or rebuilds of other packages, or cause other packages to beunable to transition to testing, please consider whether doing so wouldhelp improve the quality of Squeeze. If you believe it would, pleasecontact us to discuss the issue before uploading.

RC bugs=======

The number of Release Critical bugs in Squeeze is continuing to move inthe right direction[RC] but there are still a larger number of RC bugsthan we can freeze with.

Please feel free to pick an RC bug or three and help resolve it, whetherthat be by providing a patch, uploading an NMU or demonstrating that thebug is not RC after all.

Scheduling==========

Some of the transitions that have been discussed in this release updatewere not planned when we published our last freeze estimate. Whileconsiderably improving the user experience by providing newer upstreamreleases and a faster boot process, they imply that we will need somemore time to prepare Squeeze.

We will declare Squeeze frozen once the switch to Python 2.6 as thedefault version and the other transitions mentioned above are completed,which we currently anticipate will be during late August. If we all worktogether then we may able to finish some transitions more quickly than ourestimates.

Thanks for your attention and your assistance in making Squeeze a greatrelease!